


Snowflakes and Blueprints

by historymiss



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Drabble Collection, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-10-11
Updated: 2013-03-29
Packaged: 2017-11-16 02:36:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/534539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A place for all the drabbles I manage to write for the challenge based on the rp group I'm in. There's thirty prompts based on themes we've come up with, and I'm exploring them for my characters; Bucky Barnes and Tony Stark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Memory

His memories of her get vaguer every year. More ghostlike.

Howard is easy to recall. His hand is still in Stark Industries, his legend (there’s no other word for it, for the legacy of a man who met Captain America and built the Bomb) a tangible presence, a taste like whisky and cold metal. It’s there in everything: the press releases, the endless retrospectives. A face half-glimpsed in the dark, reflected in metal and glass.

The world forgets that Tony Stark also had a mother.

He can only recall one memory with any kind of clarity now. She sits, straight-backed, at her make-up table. She’s been drinking. She’s always been drinking. It makes Howard easier to bear. Maria powders her face as he watches, quick, brisk gestures, then snaps her jewellery on like armour. She catches her son’s eye and gives him a small, tight smile, sharp and brilliant.

(He can remember being surprised she noticed him.)

Maria picks up her glass, and toasts her son. He can’t have been older than twelve, and back from boarding school only briefly. Already his parents are becoming the distant figures of photographs and letters- letters he’ll stop sending in a year or two, because there’ll never be a reply.

This moment, though, is as intimate as it gets: he can recall the smell of her perfume, dusty-sweet and thick, cut with cigarette smoke.

Maria smiles, a wide red gash of lipstick. Her eyes are huge, and dazzle in the light.

“Never let the bastards see you blink.”


	2. Space

His new life becomes a study in empty space: in awkward silence, and distance, and things not said, no, not yet, maybe not ever. Some things are to terrible to speak, and so he remains silent, and keeps himself apart. 

Natasha visits. Her hair is vibrant in the neutral colours of Steve’s apartment, her voice, in English, strange and familiar all at once. She fills the empty space in a way she never did before. 

His fingers ache to cross the distance between them: to touch her, to feel the warmth of her skin under his hand. It would anchor him. 

“Natasha.” his voice, too, is both strange and familiar. He’s a different man in English, less articulate, less focused. In Russian, he speaks precisely, clipped, direct. This old language makes him rootless, makes him feel that, if he isn’t careful, he’ll lose his footing and fall, head over heels, over and over and into empty space.

“James.”

Theirs is a relationship grown in space hard-won: in little cracks, through which the sun might shine. Every step forward was a battle, a thread spun across the void.

He never expected to have to fight for it all over again.

(it’s worth it)


	3. Flourescent

It's probably not good, how much at home he is in hospitals. The white walls, the gleaming metal, the sense of purpose: he actually finds it a little soothing. Things get fixed here. Or they don't. 

That's a comfort, though Tony couldn't tell you why.

The light's good. He likes it bright. He holds his hand out, watches the way the fluorescent tubes wash out the colour, make the skin glow. Turns it over. There's a stain on his thumb. He'd been working when he got called out, or maybe the gauntlets leak and he hasn't realised it yet. No, that's not right, diagnostics would have sent up an alert.

Idly, Tony turns the Iron Man glove over in his hand and flexes the fingers, thinking of ways to make the articulation smoother.

Under the chatter (the gentle ticking over of a brain used to being busy), his mind reminds him: Steve's shot. Steve's shot, shot, shot, and there's nothing you can do. He fences the voice away, and lets it ramble. It's doing no harm in the light.

The nurses smile at him. He smiles back, absently, a reflex. Pepper calls, and then she hangs up, and then she calls again. 

The light doesn't change. Time stands still. 

Jan walks out. She's tiny. How had he never noticed before? Had he needed the light to bring it out?

"He'll live."


	4. Shattered

(Remember who you are, Steve said. Like it's easy)

He's ten. The house is dark, and smells of dust, and medicine, and stale air. The doctor squats down to talk to him, which he appreciates. 

Outside, the kids on the base are playing. He can hear them yelling as the doc cleans his specs and tells him his mom's dead.

He's thirteen, and the orphanage isn't the worst place he's been (or will be), not by a long shot, but it is perhaps the loneliest, and he misses his sister and he misses his mom and most of all he misses his dad, he misses the way his eyes crinkle when he smiles and the warm-wool-and-metal-buttons feel of his hugs and even the way his mouth set when he was angry, the way his voice twisted when he'd say 'I'm disappointed in you, Jim'. 

He misses anybody caring enough about him to even be disappointed. 

And he's just thinking this when he sees this kid, wheezy little Rogers, getting beaten up for the nth time that week, and Bucky figures that he can't do much about all the other stuff but here's something he can fix, right here and now, and that makes a hell of a difference.

He's twenty-eight, and it's the last birthday he'll celebrate for sixty years (though he doesn't know it yet). He spends it in a hole, filled with mud, waiting for air support that never comes. Dernier offers him a cigarette, and that's about all that anybody does to mark the occasion.

The only one who'd know what day it is is Steve, anyway, and he's miles and miles away in America, so Bucky nuts up and shuts up, cause he stopped being a kid a long time ago.

The rain lets up at midnight, though, so that's gift enough. 

(he's stopped counting because the numbers don't mean anything anymore, _adeen dva tree shteri_ on and on, wake and fall asleep and wake again. She faces him across the ring and grins, sideways and cocky, and he returns it with one of his own)

The memories fragment and shatter, burning blue as they return. Each piece is sharp and cuts him deep enough to bleed. Remember who you are. 

What he is, he finds, is shattered, and there's no guarantee he will ever be whole again.


	5. Blood

Contrary to popular opinion (or at least the opinion held by Steve Rogers) Tony Stark has, in fact, been in a real fight.

It all depends (he supposes) on how you define ‘real fight’. Fist fights? Not the purview of your average genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. Steve asks like its something he has on a list, tick it off, number six on the Bucket List: get my face smashed in by some sixty foot gorilla.

He suspects that lying on his back in Afghanistan, watching blood seep slowly through his shirt, doesn’t count.

After all. He didn’t win.


	6. Performance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Slightly out of order, here, but the prompt really jumped out at me after the events of today's rp, in which Pepper Potts revealed herself to be a skrull.
> 
> Dedicated to vanessasketch, who is my number one Pepper.

At first Tony thinks he's going mad. That the paranoia everyone always accuses him of having (perfectly healthy, in his opinion, after all, he's had more than his fair share of betrayal) has finally run wild.

Pepper is safe. Pepper is trustworthy. Pepper is home. 

(so what if she sometimes takes a little longer than normal to respond: if she occasionally blinks and twitches at the things he says, if the presence of her is wrong, a little off in a thousand different ways he can't name)

So he silences the voice. Pushes it to one side. There's too much to deal with without another patented Stark Problem, after all (and maybe he's tired of always being the problem).

But then she gets sloppy, or she stops caring, and he can't ignore it: he drops Yinsen's name, and her eyes barely flicker.

Tony knows performance. He's been performing his entire life. And this performance is wrong.


	7. Magic

He never really believed in magic. Becky ate that crap up with a spoon, of course, but then she was a kid, and she didn’t know any better. She’d sit at the dining room table, elbows propped on an open book, and read out fairy tales to herself.

“Look, Jimmy.” she’d point to the knight, or maybe it was the dragon. “That’s you.”

Bucky never really figured how she thought he’d get a horse in Brooklyn.

Later, much later, when he saw the 107th get torn apart by blue energy, he still didn’t believe in magic: what he believes in, what he can see right in front of him, is the seemingly endless Nazi ability to churn out new and terrible things to destroy his friends. 

He only starts to believe when Steve holds out the cube, that same blue light flickering (the colour of ice and steel and- yes- eyes never thought he’d see again) and tells him to remember.

And even then, it’s not the flowers-and-fairy-tales magic of Becky’s books. Because what they always left out, and what Bucky learns, far too late, is that all magic has a price. And it doesn’t care who pays it.


	8. Held

He doesn’t have a lot of memories of being held. Even before, when he was out on the town with the girls, it was sex- urgent, hasty, tongues meeting in rushed kisses because who knew when their time would be up? 

He never really thought about just being intimate. Never really seemed important. Never really seemed right.

Then, during the Red Rooms, the contact was still urgent, but violent, this time- he got used to fists on flesh, to blood in his mouth (you move too slow, ne tak) and the grunt of his opponent hitting his arm, expecting blood and bone and finding metal.

If there was something else, he doesn’t remember it until too late- until the dreams (only they’re not dreams, not really: more like memories, too bright and vivid and real in the dark) come spilling out and he starts awake, breath caught in his lungs, his eyes blinking away the ghosts.

Then Natasha holds him: lays his head in her lap and traces the lines the dreams have left on his face, soft and real and intimate, and tells him, just with her presence, that they have all the time in the world.


	9. Kitchen

Some things are defined by their absence. The kitchen seems to echo with its emptiness- Tony is left wondering why he built the damn thing so big.

If he tries, he can see her there, sat at the end of the counter. Their mealtimes only coincide at night- she clears an hour in her schedule and he wanders up from the workshop or the conference room, or stumbles in from whichever part of the world that needed saving that day, and they eat and talk over each other about their concerns.

It's too quiet now. 

He paces the floor, trainers squeaking on the polished surface, and tries to think of something else. Anything else. But Tony finds that his brain has failed him, and where there would normally be plans and diagrams and endless, busy thoughts rattling around his head, there is now only one thing dominating every squiggle and synapse of his brain.

She's gone.

Pepper's gone. And he doesn't know if she's ever coming back.


	10. Sting

A sting's a little thing to give a girl. It doesn't do much, this pathetic assemblage of wires and electricity that wraps up and around her hand, hidden in the glove until it glows (blue, naturally, like the sky and the ocean and maybe certain sets of eyes).She prefers her guns, if she thinks about it at all.

"I could make this better." Stark says, turning the mechanism in his hands, callused fingers and square, clean nails tracking the course the electricity takes. 

"I can teach you to use this." Barnes says, in the voice he only uses in her memories, no loose and lazy accent drawling out his vowels. 

A sting isn't much, just a little thing, but it can distract, shock, redirect. It can put an enemy down or wake you up. Natasha prefers her guns. But stings are useful too.


	11. War

War

(an attempt at something like cuil theory)

1\. War devours them both.

2\. Tony Stark courts war like a lover: he compliments her with the work of his hands and brain and heart, spurns her to keep her interested. She comes for him in the desert, smoke trailing in the wind to mark her passage, and all he can think is _finally._

(When Bucky falls he has a similar thought: that this is the worst, and thank God, because someone who loves war like he does (quiet, intense, the space between fist and flesh, blade and blood) has no place next to the person Steve's become)

3\. The man that leaves the cave is not Tony Stark. The man that leaves the cave has a new heart and new eyes and a new voice, a new language heavy and unfamiliar in his mouth. He sits in a workshop that belonged to another man, synapses jangling with the way his new life no longer fits around the old, and tries, desperately, to remember who he is. 

4\. War fragments Bucky and scatters him to the winds, his bones across the mountainside, his guts open to the sky. These scraps are gathered up and, when he takes them in his mismatched hands, they run through his fingers, burn with cold, but if he is smart and strong and brave enough he knows that he can take these scraps and these weapons and build them into something terrible enough to escape. 

5\. War devours them both. She takes their bodies and their bones and chews them, cracks them, sucks out the marrow to leave them hollow. But she gives them so much: mind and body and soul, she reforges them into something great.

War devours them both. But she will always consume what she loves.


	12. Liar

Ho Yinsen becomes a liar by necessity. He has no choice.

It starts in Golmira, when he learns to look men in the eye and tell them that while their time may be short (a week, his mind reminds him, critically, as if he is seeing one of his father’s faulty engines)- that there may be a chance, if they struggle. If they fight.

He tells his wife and son it will be alright, when Raza and the Ten Rings attack. It is another lie.

(Lie to yourself: you will see them again, though you’ve never been sure. You have to be certain, or the darkness will swallow you whole)

The next lie comes easy- he looks at this American, and his mind begins to buzz. 

Maybe there’s a chance.

“You’re better than this. Is this the last act of defiance of the great Tony Stark?”


	13. Elements

They are not supposed to leave the complex. But he has been good, and so they let him out for exercise, like a dog. He runs. One foot, then the other, leaving marks in the snow. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

The rhythm seems empty, somehow, but he has no way to fill it. Instead, he concentrates on the cold, raw against his face and pouring like water through the gaps in his clothes. It is good to feel the elements against his skin. Inside the complex it is not cold. It is not warm either. You would not know the season- nobody asks what season it is, anyway.

(time is strange, here)

He turns right at the fence. This close to the guard tower, cigarette butts litter the snow, dirty footprints turning the white to slush. What looked blank and white from the door as he stepped out is, in reality, churned and broken.

The wind raises his hair and he looks up to see snow start to fall. He stands and watches it, feels it settle on his upraised hands, his face, his tongue, the cold sharp on his teeth.

But it does not mean anything. It is only snow.


	14. Wire

Tony Stark has woken up in a lot of weird places. He has a reputation, after all. He's woken up in fountains, in public parks, and on one memorable occasion the roof of an air force base, handcuffed to Rhodey (who still won't speak of it to this day). 

What I'm saying is, he's no stranger to waking up in a completely unfamiliar place.

So first things first. There's this thing in his nose. Did he go to the hospital? Did he drink too much? Pull it out (oh God, it's longer than I thought it'd be)- inch by inch, staring at it in a kind of academic horror. This is new. 

The bandages are new too. The pain, dull but constant, sitting in his chest. This oddly solid feeling under his hand as he pats them, then tears them away. His stomach lurches emptily as his fingers meet metal.

This isn't real. This can't be real.

Skin puckered around steel, screws driven into the flesh. 

"Oh God." Tony mutters, but he can't stop looking. And then he rolls, and feels the tug of the wire.


	15. Father

Tony Stark inherits a number of things from his father. A certain swaggering bravado, for a start: a desperate, pleading need to be seen among the bright lights and brighter steel of his inventions. A way with words. Starks, it seems, can buy and sell anything. As long as they created it, it’s theirs to use and give and take.

He inherits a face that haunts him in the half-dark, a resemblance that he can’t hide so he flaunts it, grows the mustache and, later, the beard, and wears the suits like he’s proving something, to Howard or to himself, he’s not quite sure. 

He inherits a company nobody thinks he can run- not Obie, not himself, not anyone, and he inherits the attitude that allows him to do it anyway. He sits in the boardroom and he is his father’s son, and he hates how easy it feels.

He inherits a life that turns in circles, like ripples, spreading outward from a point. A way of living in returns and repeats that passes down from history, mistakes and ghosts from the past that can reach out and drown you if you’re not quick and smart and careful. 

Tony Stark inherits much: that’s his gift, given to him before he was even born. But he is by nature a creator, and so he builds up more.


End file.
